Spanish Civil War - the right result for Spain?

OK, I’m perfectly willing to be shown the error of my ways here, there’s a lot I don’t know about the period, but here’s what I’m thinking. Couldn’t a good case be made that Franco’s victory in the civil war was the best possible result for the future of Spain?

The wily Generalissimo kept Hitler at bay throughout the war, refusing Hitler’s pleas (demands, even) that Spain enter the war on the side of the Axis. (The fact also remains that Franco refused to deport Spanish Jews to the Nazi death camps, despite being constantly pressured by Germany to do just that. Spanish Jewry survived the war - that wasn’t by sheer good fortune.)

After the war Franco prepared the way for Spain to become a constitutional monarchy and democracy when he died. His legacy to Spain and the world was not all bad.

Now imagine if the Republicans had won the Civil War. Would Hitler have left Spain alone (that’s if Spain hadn’t already proclaimed hostilities when Russia was invaded)? No, even if Spain had remained nominally neutral Hitler would never have suffered a Socialist state on the border of France. The odds are that Spain would have been occupied with the consequent loss of life that would entail not to speak of the transports that would be continuously rolling towards Auschwitz packed with the Jewish population of Spain.

And after the war, if the Republicans had returned to power, would they have gravitated towards the Soviet bloc? Unlikely I think. As with Greece, the Western powers would not have allowed a Communist takeover of Spain. But a far-left leaning postwar government taking its ideas of a free society from Eastern rather than Western Europe would have been a real possibility. Would Spain have reached the same goal as with Franco? Probably but maybe it would have taken longer.

Anyway there it is. A question inspired by the number of movies set in the period which treat the Conservatives/Nationalists as cartoon villains and the Republicans (including of course the famed International Brigade) as fighters for freedom, one of those freedoms seemingly being the freedom to blow up churches and kill priests).

OK, that’s all I got.

But what if a defeat in Spain discredited Hitler, and his generals pulled the coup they’d planned on until Munich made him too successful to remove?

Franco did sideline the true believer Spanish Fascists, and brought in technocrats to upgrade the economy. He shot his former enemies and let the Catholic Church do whatever they wanted, but that makes him no more a monster than Eamon De Valera. Personally, I’d have like to have seen what Anarchists in Barcelona might have accomplished, but they were doomed under both Franco or the Stalinists.

Like all alternate history scenarios, you run into the problem of how it would happen – if the Communists were militarily strong enough to hold Spain they would have done so. What change in background circumstances from 1920 to 1940 do you envision happening that could have changed the outcome of the Civil War? That is what dictates whether the decades since would have been better or not.

It’s certainly possible that it was, in fact, the “best” possible outcome in an ultimate pragmatic sense.

But by that logic, slavery in America was the “best” thing, because it built up a strong, prosperous nation with vast agricultural exports. Ditto for the seizure of the Americas from the people already living there: the monstrous devastation of the American Indians is “the best thing” because it created a powerful U.S. that could stand off fascism in Germany and Japan.

Evil is still evil, even when it has fortuitous consequences.

I think you’re giving Franco undeserved credit. I believe France expected Juan Carlos to maintain the right-wing dictatorship that Franco had established. There were certainly no efforts made by Franco in his lifetime to change things.

It was Juan Carlos, after Franco’s death, who began transforming Spain into a constitutional monarchy and democracy.

I agree that most likely the United States would have intervened to prevent a left-wing government from taking power in Spain. (In addition to Greece, they also worked on keeping left-wing parties out of power in postwar Italy and France.)

But let’s just imagine that the Republicans did manage to re-establish themselves. I don’t think the Soviets would have been able to control Spain as they did Eastern Europe - there wouldn’t have been any Red Army units in Spain. Spain might have ended up as another Yugoslavia - a left-wing country but not a Soviet satellite.

And that could have been a good thing for American foreign policy. In the postwar years, America became convinced that communism was a monolith. They just assumed every communist or near-communist was taking orders from Moscow. This made the Soviets look a lot stronger than they really were and it cut the United States off from some diplomatic opportunities.

A Republican Spain, independent of Soviet control, might have been the key to a more flexible American outlook. The United States might have been willing to work with left-wing regimes as long as they remained free of Soviet control. And many of these countries would have been happy to do so.

Communism and fascism are both evil. Just saying that isn’t really giving us any insights about Spanish history the way that seriously considering why the war turned out the way it did might.

Going off at something of a “detail” tangent: I was intrigued by the above, having imagined that as at the World War II era, there would have been virtually no Spanish Jewry – with Ferdinand and Isabella having radically addressed that problem some centuries before. Googling, revealed that as from the mid-19th century, Spain’s official position re this issue became less harsh, and the fifteenth-century mandate totally excluding Jews from the country, was rescinded: some Jews of Spanish origin moved back to Spain, and at the time of WWII numbered about 6,000.

It appears that while in the event, Spain’s Jews escaped the Holocaust; this was one of the many issues on which Franco, in his WWII tightrope act vis-a-vis the Axis powers, equivocated with Germany – he might, under sufficient duress, have consented to hand over Spain’s Jews, and measures were taken to facilitate this action if it were seen as unavoidable.

You can’t assume that communists would have taken over the country absent Sanjurjo and Franco.

Yes it’s the White Terror that makes him a monster.

Yeah, nothing like the Red Terror to feel safer.

Franco had to know that Juan Carlos met with reformists and had reformist tendancies, indeed one of the reason he shied away from making him his designated successor for so long was this.

As for the OP, I find it hard to imagine anyone but Franco managing to keep Spain out of WW2. And yes, that was a good thing.

Not true. Franco thought he was leaving the Falange-based system atado y bien atado, “tied, and tied properly”; he wasn’t planning on either a constitutional monarchy or a democracy. Juan Carlos I’s choice of Adolfo Suárez to “cut me that knot” earned Suárez the nickname of “Juan Carlos’ scissors”.

(Out of time)
clairobscur, I don’t know how far would things have gotten before something else exploded, but my own paternal family picked up weapons on Franco’s side because they felt under attack by the Communists (no, they weren’t Falange; they were Carlistas and had spent the last century taking up arms against the government once or twice per generation). Things were very, very bad and getting worse. I am sure that being in the mess that was the war gave many a wolf-wannabe bigger teeth than he already had, mind you; would my maternal grandfather’s former unit have been locked down in a church and all of them killed, without the uprising? I imagine not. Would the Communists have purged Anarchists? Not in that way, but they were already having fights and not of the kind limited to strong words. I’m now wondering if Turtledove has any books on this particular alternate history…

Stalin worked hard to make sure that was the only other option. Again, you can conceive of the entire time period between the Russian Revolution and Franco’s final victory as going differently somehow, but at that point you’re just writing historical fiction on a massive scale.

Not really relevant to the point I was making and apologies if I should have been clearer. The poster I quoted seemed to be equating Franco with Éamon de Valera. de Valera, for all his faults, wasn’t a dictator and didn’t murder political opponents (in peacetime).

Not exactly, but he does have The War That Came Early series where Sanjurjo lives and actively joins the Axis. As a result, tensions in Europe are higher and the general war begins in 1938 over Czechoslovakia rather than a year later over Poland.

Off-at-a-tangent, as is my wont; but though I like a lot of Turtledove’s writings – personally, God save me from ever having to read anything more by him, related however remotely to World War II. The War That Came Early, and sundry other material – talk about redefining flogging stuff to death and way beyond…

Yup, my bad; completely misread it.